Policing, Culture and Community: Effecting Change through the Arts
Policing, Culture and Community is a place-based interdisciplinary body of work that uses arts and performance-based methodologies to interrogate contemporary challenges around police-community engagement with seldom-heard communities. Partners are collaborators and also co-creators in many instances.
Our research explores the potentials and challenges afforded by arts and culture in the context of a widespread crisis in police legitimacy and in light of the damaged relationships between police and some communities.
We approach this object of study through two lenses: firstly, we look at the opportunities arts-based interventions might offer as a medium for police-community engagement. Here we consider the ways in which creative initiatives can offer a democratising space in which mutual perceptions can begin to shift, and we explore the complexities and challenges of these endeavours. And secondly, we explore the possibilities afforded by the arts for effecting broader change in police practice - through innovative approaches to police training and by enabling young people to communicate their lived experiences of policing on their own terms, and in ways that can be presented to police actors and decision-makers.
Our full report into arts-based police-community engagement through Coventry City of Culture 2021 is available online.
In 2023 we collaborated with the Belgrade Theatre to produce a performance piece - After Preston - based on the findings from our research around young people’s experiences of policing in Coventry. Preceded by workshops with young people in schools and at the Belgrade, the play was performed on 1st December 2023 to an audience of young people, police, arts practitioners, probation officers and academics. The audience discussion and feedback on the themes raised in the play informs our work going forward.
We draw on this play in our new work for 2025 with West Midlands Police, using arts-based methods and materials to challenge and change police perspectives and practice through the Police Race Action Plan.
We are continuing our collaboration with the Belgrade Theatre in Keeping us Safe? working closely with young people and schools, using arts-led approaches to explore young people's perspectives on criminal justice and policing, and their vision for a fairer future.
For more information, follow the links below.
This project is led by:
Professor Jacqueline HodgsonLink opens in a new window is Professor of Law and co-director of COPRLink opens in a new window at the University of Warwick. Her work focuses on how the criminal justice process operates in practice in the UK and Europe, using empirical, comparative and interdisciplinary methods.
Dr Rachel LewisLink opens in a new window is a Teaching Fellow in the Sociology Department at Warwick University. She works at the intersections between Law, Sociology, and Applied Linguistics, and focuses on issues around bordering, anxiety, and punishment in the contemporary UK.
Follow us: @PoliceartsLink opens in a new window
Our collaborators:
The Belgrade Theatre
Amahra Spence
Jen Davis
Joe Rose
Yasmin Dawes
Jay Zorenti-Nakhid
Kieren Hamilton-Amos
Cory Weekes
West Midlands Police
Local Coventry & Birmingham schools
